I’m not going to go into deep commentary, but will touch upon a few movies I’ve seen lately:
The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy: 4 stars out of 5. Not as bad as the worst reviews claimed, but nowhere near as good as the books or the bits of the radio plays that I’ve heard before.
The War of the Worlds: 3 stars out of 5. Sorry, but if it were set in a Victorian or Edwardian milieu, this movie would have been wonderful. Set in the present, it was just… anachronistic. Aliens that can travel across intergalactic space, set up force fields, and pilot lighting bolts can’t figure out disease immunity or the dangers of bacteria? I mean, how arrogant! We figured that out by the late 19th century, long before we ever got into space, didn’t we? Other parts of the alien’s tech was also painfully anachronistic, such as the snaking viewscope that hunted characters at one point. Uh, sorry, but if we low-tech sods have wireless internet for free in libraries across North America already, not to mention remote-controlled cockroach scouts that are being developed in the labs (something I read about in an already-dated Jensen book), I’m sure the alien invaders to Earth would have something more advanced than us, especially after planning the invasion oveer a million years or more.
Again, not as good as the infamous Orson Welles radio-play. But if it causes people out there to read the book, as it has given me the urge to do, then I suppose I can thank Spielberg. But something I read recently about Hollywood cannibalizing SF rings more true than ever. Which reminds me of another remake on the way… King Kong. What the hell? Are there no new ideas left in Hollywood?
Hotel Rwanda: 5 stars out of 5. This movie, based on true events in is amazing. Even more amazing is the audio commentary on the bonus tracks, where you hear the story of the main character, Paul Rusesabagina, told by the man himself. This movie simply blew me away.
Lemony Snickets’ A Series of Unforunate Events: 4.5 stars out of 5. Except for a slight bit of tiresomeness in the recurrence of the same bad guy, over and overa tiresomeness added to by the fact that it’s always Jim Carrey playing the bad guyI think this movie is brilliant. My folks both complained that it was too dark and weird, not for children. They missed the point that it’s exactly for that reason that kids like itand kids overwhelming have liked it, as the books are sold out all over the place, even nowbecause it smacks of the real coldness, the real silencing that children to experience in the world. That aspect of the film’s subversiveness is brilliant and makes up for what is sometimes a so-so plot. I do wish to read the books… perhaps if they are published in a single onibus someday, I shall buy them all in one fell swoop.
Frailty: 3.5 stars out of 5. This movie was just on TV last night, and it caught me enough to get me watching, though I wandered off a few times into the book I was reading. It was a very brutal portrait of the kind of coercion thatI think , in a more subtle way, often underlies religious beliefs as they are passed on to children. A father becomes convinced that he is a holy warrior serving God by “destroying demons”. This awful, Satanic questcontinually garbed in the trappings of a holy war is concluded finally with the triumph of a demon-killerin reality a horrible, evil man bent on killing people. Or does it end in the triumph of a good which is so stomach-turning that the sane could only turn their backs on any God that commanded it? It’s a fascinating look at how we see good and evil, and justify evil as good, depending on our motivations, upbringings, and preconceptions, and sometimes even our delusions.
House of Sand and Fog: 5 stars out of 5. Again, DVD commentary was priceless. I am beginning to think I can tell a good movie by the fact that my parents hate it. This is a straight-up tragedy, with no real explicable cause, no preventability, no reasoning. Ben Kingsley often in the commentary refers to it as one would a Greek Tragedy, and one can tell from many of his comments what a brilliant man he is; his performance, and most of the others, are quite stunning.